cognitive neuroscientist / fanatic runner

Tag Archives: sitting

Six months ago I wrote in jubilation that I had finally overcome my 17-year long struggle with high-hamstring tendinopathy. What first emerged as a nagging high school running injury has since haunted me with its frustratingly sporadic flare-ups. It seemed to rear its ugly head at random, with no clear relation to any aspect of my training – not distance, speed or hills. It must be my form, I reasoned. Since rehabbing with PRP, I’ve devoted these past several months to optimizing my running mechanics to prevent another resurgence of the dreaded hamstring pain. And these efforts have been paying off, as I’ve felt stronger and more fluid in my running than perhaps ever before. I considered myself officially victorious over this decades-long injury.

That is, until one week ago … one week ago, on a rest day (i.e., no running) at the end of an easy, low-mileage recovery week. After some light morning yoga and a day spent sitting at lab, I began to feel an achy spasm and cramping in my hamstring – an all-too familiar sensation that literally appeared out of nowhere on my drive home. The pain escalated over the subsequent hours and I was soon in the throes of my worst hamstring flare-up in a year. Tension and pain radiated from my neck down through the back of my knee and I fantasized about a chiropractic adjustment of my misaligned back and pelvis. I struggled through each run this week, but rest was not an option. In fact, the greatest pain was at rest; sitting, and especially driving, were torturous and even sleeping was a challenge. A week later, I’m finally seeing some light at the end of the tunnel, thanks to some aggressive ART, Graston and dry needling. While encouraging, this does not answer what caused the flare-up in the first place. I had done nothing obvious to exacerbate it, and had even been cautiously respecting my recovery week.

The answer, I’m now convinced, lay in a tiny skin irritation at the ischial tuberosity where the hamstring tendon attaches to the sit bones – the exact spot where I felt the most intense pain. The spot appeared coincidentally – or so I thought – around the same time the hamstring pain first set in. The “coincidence” didn’t faze me until a week later, and I finally began putting two and two together. The irritation was at the epicenter of my pain, which escalated to unbearable when sitting. Incidentally, there have been only two periods of my life when I’ve enjoyed extended relief from the injury: First, during a six-month trip around the world, during which my days were spent walking, hiking and exploring. Second, another six-month period while briefly working in a lab that required me to be on my feet at length. A clear pattern began to emerge. Freedom from desk-work and sitting correlated with symptom relief, whereas excessive sitting (with a sore on my tush as proof) correlated with spontaneous hamstring flare-ups.

Could my running injury have been a sitting injury all along? Perhaps this is wishful thinking. Perhaps there remains a running training error at the heart of the issue that I have yet to discover. But until then, I’m confidently adding hamstring trauma to the growing list of reasons sitting is hazardous to our health and a threat to the sanity of a running addict.